‘Author: The JT Leroy Story’ Turns The Page On The Greatest Literary Hoax Of The 21st Century

“There’s nothing worse than being a fat punk,” laments author Laura Albert in the documentary film Author: The JT Leroy Story. It may be the most honest thing she says in the documentary, a sympathetic look at the genesis, perpetuation and ultimate destruction of JT Leroy, the fictional literary and pop sensation she created.

Jeff Feuerzeig’s film, which is now available to stream on Amazon Prime, provides a platform for Albert’s unconfirmed, uncontested side of the story. According to her, she created the breathy, southern, HIV positive, lot lizard young author as a means of coping with childhood sexual and physical abuse. An impromptu call to a teen suicide hot line (as an adult woman pretending to be the boy) yielded Leroy fully formed. “His” therapist encouraged him to write, a process so fulfilling that Leroy began to reach out to literary mentors for feedback, which eventually begat acclaimed roman à clefs (Sarah, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things) along with celebrity fans. Realizing that people will want to see Leroy in the flesh, Albert deploys her sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop, to pose as the mysterious young man. Leroy is eventually unmasked by the press as Albert/Knoop, just as Albert is successfully sort-of becoming acknowledged for her own work, like getting a writing job on Deadwood (albeit in the guise of friend-of-JT Leroy.)

There are numerous issues with Albert having so much unbridled narrative in Author. The first is the troubling lack of confirmation or denial coming from her family. To level major uncontested accusations against her parents — who, she claims, put her in a mental institution — seems journalistically lazy, particularly when the entire doc is based on a lie that she created. Why should we believe anything Albert says?

But the bigger hole in Author is all the unanswered questions about how the Leroy myth got so widely perpetuated. Why, for instance, did her partner, Geoff Knoop, along with Savannah, go along with Leroy’s increasingly convoluted public myths for so long? Was it super-fun? Was Albert paying them? Or is she simply a manipulative mastermind?

The symbiosis between Leroy and his celebrity fanbase is also relatively unexplored. If you could conjure up a list of the white celebrities who most summed up the “if you’re damaged or delicate you must be deep” pretentious portion of the late ‘90’s/early 00’s, you would get JT Leroy’s biggest fans: Courtney Love, Winona Ryder, Michael Pitt, Billy Corgan. On the one hand, Albert/Leroy denounced the celebrity fandom as an irritating distraction, yet she and the documentary wrap themselves in a blanket of stars. The doc opens not with Knoop or Albert but Winona Ryder, eyes glistening, discussing Leroy and the importance of his work with the emotion of a mother describing her brilliant, heroic son. Some sort of witty analysis about why Leroy attracted such a high profile base would have been satisfying, but the best we get is hearing Billy Corgan’s barely concealed boredom as he fields music production questions from Geoff Knoop (Albert, for reasons that go unexplained, taped all of her Leroy-related phone calls), the audible polite disinterest in Courtney Love’s voice when JT tries to tell her that Albert is the true genius.

What could have been great about the Laura Albert story is the story she is unwilling to admit, that of the fat punk, the shy antiheroine who finds acclaim but in somebody else’s body. Did she envision the whole time that she could use JT to ultimately put herself at center stage? Did she feel a sense of satisfaction making her celebrity fans look foolish, after they’d shown a preference for JT over her? At one point, while Knoop-as-Leroy and actress Asia Argento have a romantic interlude (that may or may not have been Argento’s attempts to seduce film rights to The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things), Albert professes feeling like Leroy was a doll that had come alive and gotten away from her. However, instead of going further into what type of issues of envy or control she had with regards to Knoop, she merely states that Knoop was “on the clock, on the dime.” Instead of examining what kind of person spends so much time creating and perpetuating a living fiction, Author, with the retelling-by-way-of-animation style that seems in style right now, repeatedly offers up her tales of childhood abuse as some sort of explanation for Leroy’s whole existence.

I got to see a touch of Albert’s defensiveness myself in 2004, when I interviewed Leroy for my blog. I asked “Leroy” about the mixed reviews the The Heart Is Deceitful had received, and Albert Trumpily replied, “It really didn’t get mixed reviews. It got really good reviews.” Albert’s fascination with celebrity was in full swing, too – dropping celebrity names liberally. At one point I asked him/her about the dangers of becoming overhyped and Albert volunteered “You sometimes lose a certain amount of people with the hype. Zadie Smith and Nick Hornby both told me that they liked my stuff but were turned off by the hype.” I checked with Hornby, who was indeed a fan of his work but “I absolutely would not have told him I was deterred by the hype. 1) I’d never say anything like that. Way too rude. And 2) I live in London. There really wasn’t any hype here.”

It’s a shame that while Albert comes across as desperate to be seen in ‘Author,’ we don’t really get to see her at all.

“Hoax” is a word that Albert rejects, but that’s just semantics. The JT Leroy story is one so of its time, so trapped in amber, when the internet was newish and live literature by young people was the thing, that it’s unlikely to stir up any great discussions today. Literary scandals like Leroy’s or James Frey seem like those of a quaint, bygone age. Whether it’s a myth or a hoax or pop art, Albert is unrepentant about Leroy, and it’s not a good look. Whether or not she got people to buy her books based on a dishonest premise, she did succeed in convincing scores of people to care about a boy who had suffered countless traumas. Albert gives birth to an actual human baby during JT Leroy’s heyday, to a son, but this grants her no awareness about why people might be pissed off to discover that the troubled kid they cared about didn’t exist. What kind of person doesn’t see that as an issue does not go explored. It’s a shame that while Albert comes across as desperate to be seen in Author, we don’t really get to see her at all.

Claire Zulkey is a writer from Chicago. You can follow her at Zulkey.com or @Zulkey on Twitter.